Thoughts after some use

[dogcow]

I own Affinity Designer, which basically means I don't have to open the piece of junk app called Illustrator anymore, and when I heard about Affinity Photo, I was really excited to think someone finally made a proper competitor to Photoshop. Though I have a fondness for Photoshop after years of use, it has become very buggy and slow, and I'm not too fond of Adobe in general. I have no desire to rent software.

 

So, after some time messing around with the beta, I'd say Affinity Photo is surprisingly robust for something pre-1.0. I'm so used to "the Photoshop way" that some things were not very obvious, and some things I just don't agree with. But overall I'm very impressed at both Affinity Photo's feature set and speed. It seems quite stable, and most features I used produced the results I expected based on the equivalent Photoshop features.

 

Some more specific feedback:

• I finally figured out that you can mask with a layer by dragging it onto another. I assume to mask a group of layers, you'd have to create a layer group and drag onto that. I'm not sure I really like that compared with Photoshop -- having masked layers being indented makes things a bit more obvious to see with a quick scan, and easier to adjust the mask layer.

• Color palette support seems minimal. I hope 1.0 will have the Pantone palettes? I assume there's probably a license fee for you guys to include those, but they're really needed.

• I messed with the gradient tool for 15 minutes and could not figure out how to draw a gradient. Why does it only show one color? How do I set multiple colors and their blend percentages? This tool really needs a UI rethink; it's unintelligible right now.

• I prefer how Photoshop shows adjustment layers as attached directly to the parent layer. Affinity Photo shows Effects layers in a separate panel and that creates a layer of indirection and increased cognitive load. In Photoshop I often copy adjustment layers from one layer to another. Can you even do this with Effects?

• It's going to take a while to get used to the layer visibility buttons being on the right instead of on the left as they are in Photoshop. It might help to quickly scan if the layer UI was slightly dimmed when their visibility is off. It's also a bit inconsistent that visibility of layers uses a checkbox icon, but channel visibility uses an eye icon.

• Having the red 'traffic light' window button close the entire app goes against Apple's OS X human interface guidelines and makes it feel like a Windows/Adobe app. It should only close the current document.

 

And more a more general comment about both apps: No disrespect intended to Affinity's icon designers, but please please please get someone who understands OS X icon design to redo your app icons (I'd suggest IconFactory). They currently look like 1990's Windows business apps, and that's not very fun to look at in the Dock.

 

 

[TomM1]

The gradient editor shown here.

Apparently one needs to create a fill layer to draw a gradient.